Scorcher

Chapter 32

The next night, Carver found a different vantage point to watch the garage exit of Dewitt’s apartment building.

He sat sipping bitter black coffee from McDonald’s and listening to soft music on the Olds’s radio. Sade was sighing her bluesy, velvet version of love. The car’s canvas top was up, but he had both front windows cranked down so a breeze pressed through the interior. It was 11:00 P.M. It had rained that afternoon, and though the temperature was still in the eighties the air smelled fresh, carrying the scent of the untended flower bed bordering the low stone wall around the apartment grounds. In the swimming pool a lone teen-age girl frolicked like a carefree mermaid, splashing and submerging, then surfacing to tread water with her head and shoulders above the rippling surface. Now and then she’d shake her long hair and hurl drops of water glistening in the pale and shimmering artificial light bouncing off the pool. Carver hoped someone had cleaned the water and added chemicals, or the mermaid might contract anything from athlete’s foot to trench mouth.

Nadine and Dewitt had eaten supper at a steakhouse downtown, then stopped for a while at something called Roll-the-Dice Corner Lounge. There was a mural of a huge pair of dice showing snake eyes painted on the front brick wall near the entrance. The place seemed to be one huge speaker cabinet from which hard rock music pulsed. It made Carver’s head hurt even where he was parked halfway down the block.

Dewitt had finally driven Nadine back to where her car was parked at his dealership, and she’d followed him in her sleek red Datsun to his apartment. There was no indication that either of them had been drinking; they both drove straight and true.

They’d been inside the apartment since just after ten, maybe trying to recover their hearing. The lights were still burning, lessening the likelihood that any of what Lloyd Van Meter called Girl and Boy Stuff was going on.

Occasionally Carver chanced leaving his parking space to drive to the McDonald’s two blocks away, either to relieve his bladder or to get another cup of coffee to help keep him alert. The two things seemed to be related.

He was on his third cup, and the inside of his mouth tasted flat and stale. The coffee itself was beginning to taste flat and stale. It made his teeth ache.

The garage’s wide door twitched and then started to roll up, tugged by an automatic opener. Pale fluorescent light spilled out onto Low Citrus Drive. Carver placed his foam cup of coffee in a plastic holder he had stuck with adhesive on the dashboard. He waited to see what would emerge from the garage.

It was a gray Cadillac, with the darkly tinted windows that seemed almost mandatory for luxury cars in Florida. Carver had learned a lot about the building and its tenants, and he knew the car belonged to the gem dealer on the second floor.

He relaxed and watched the overhead door glide down as the Caddy made a smooth left turn and drove past him. The last glimmer of light disappeared from the pavement in front of the door. The street was dark and quiet again. He reached for his coffee.

At eleven-thirty the garage door rose again. Carver glanced up and saw that the lights were still on in Dewitt’s apartment, but he wedged his half-full coffee cup in the plastic holder and sat ready.

Dewitt’s dark blue Jaguar four-door sedan pulled slowly from the garage and picked up speed as it rolled toward the corner. In the wash of illumination from the streetlight, Carver could see only one figure in the car’s front seat.

The right side of the seat!

Then he remembered the Jag was imported from England, and the steering wheel was on the right. Dewitt was alone. The smooth snarl of the car’s turbo-charged engine drifted back to him as Dewitt played the accelerator.

Nadine was in the apartment by herself. Maybe she and Dewitt had had an argument. Maybe Dewitt was driving to pick up Paul and bring him back to see Nadine. Maybe Dewitt was going out for ice. Carver cautioned himself; it was easy to make much of nothing.

He settled back again to wait. The breeze picked up, bringing more fragrance of flowers, mingled with the noxious residue of the departed Jag’s exhaust fumes.

Fifteen minutes later the gleaming gray Cadillac came back and disappeared down the shallow ramp into the garage, like an exotic craft returning to its mother ship.

The garage door stayed open. Nadine’s red Datsun darted out and screeched into a sharp left turn, following the course of the Jaguar.

Carver sloshed warm coffee onto his hand as he jammed the cup into the plastic holder. He started the Olds, crammed the shift lever into Drive, and fell in behind the Datsun, hanging well back.

Nadine knew she’d been watched, and even if she’d talked with Adam and gotten the impression Carver was off the case, she might be warier than usual. Paul possessed an I.Q. of over 140, but Nadine might be ahead of him. It was difficult to know; youth had a way of overriding intelligence.

Through the Datsun’s rear louvers Carver saw that Nadine was alone. On the left side of the car this time. He smiled. No momentary surprises.

Keeping several cars between them, Carver followed her out of town. The Datsun had a dim left taillight and was easy to track from a distance. Nadine turned north on Highway 95.

He thought she might be going home, but she soared past the Hillsboro turnoff, holding a steady seventy-five. The Olds, with its prehistoric powerful V-8 engine, kept pace easily a quarter of a mile back.

There was very little traffic on the wide highway. The car’s tires whined on still-warm pavement. Carver relaxed and rested an arm on the metal window frame, feeling the cool wind pound at his bare, crooked elbow. The rush of air whirled in the Olds, ballooning the canvas top and howling out the unzipped back window. The speedometer needle might as well have been painted on seventy-five. The Olds slipped into that automotive high-speed trance that only big cars can achieve.

Nadine drove for about an hour, then cut west at Palm Beach Gardens and got on Florida’s Turnpike. An uneasy feeling started at the nape of Carver’s neck and spread coldly. This wasn’t Nadine’s normal behavior. She was on her way somewhere out of the ordinary tonight, in a hurry even for her, and that could spell Paul Kave. Paul Kave, the kid the odds and the law said suffered from a compulsion to burn people to death.

And the odds and the law might be right. Carver still wasn’t sure about Paul, despite what he’d told Adam to try to get Adam to back off and give him room and time to operate. Paul was still the number one possibility as the killer of Carver’s son.

Carver reached over and pulled his old Colt automatic from the glove compartment and checked the action. He placed a hand over the top of the gun and yanked backward on smooth steel; a round snapped from the clip into the chamber.

Just below Orlando, Nadine exited the turnpike at 192 and drove west toward Kissimmee. The sensation on the back of Carver’s neck grew colder. He was beginning to suspect where she was going, and it didn’t figure. Why would Nadine drive to see family black sheep Emmett Kave?

Unless Paul was at Emmett’s place and wanted to talk with both of them before deciding on a meeting with Carver.

That was it, Carver figured. Must be it!

The low red Datsun veered onto an off-ramp, geared and growled neatly through a series of turns, and Carver found himself in Emmett Kave’s neighborhood. Oddly, the area was even more depressing at night. Flat streets, low houses, rusted cars and pickup trucks. The occasional glint of a discarded beer can glaring like a weary eye from the weeds. Glimpses of poverty caused the imagination to conjure up exaggerated pictures of despair.

Then he was on Jupiter Avenue, Emmett’s street.

Carver braked the Olds and pulled to the curb half a block from Emmett’s run-down house. He watched as the Datsun’s brake lights flared, and it slowed and right-turned into Emmett’s driveway, bouncing as it rolled over the bump at the sidewalk. It edged up near the front porch and stopped, then its headlights winked out.

The driver’s-side door opened.

Joel Dewitt stood up out of the car, raised his arms, and stretched.

Carver reached for the cold cup of coffee, fumbled it, and dropped it to the Olds’s floor. He felt some of the cool liquid splash onto his right sock at the line of his shoe. He ignored the spilled coffee and kept his gaze nailed on Joel Dewitt, even though the inside of the Olds reeked of the stuff. Hot night air closed in on the motionless car.

Damn Nadine! he thought. She’d fooled him, taken Dewitt’s car to meet Paul, while Dewitt, in her car, had deliberately misled Carver.

And Carver had snapped at the bait and devoured it and half the line in his eagerness.

But no. Dewitt had left the apartment too long after Nadine to be a decoy. He would, in fact, have left first if he’d wanted to trick Carver. Nadine had simply borrowed the Jaguar to throw Carver off the trail; possibly Dewitt hadn’t even given her permission or known about it until it was too late to stop her. Dewitt, even without a key, would have had no trouble starting Nadine’s car; every dealer knew how to hot-wire an ignition. Nadine was an independent girl.

One who might be anywhere tonight. With her brother.

As Carver watched, Emmett’s yellow porch light came on, flickering as if the bulb were loose. Dewitt slowly strolled around to the Datsun’s trunk, or what passed for a trunk, and raised the rear deck. He bent low and pulled something out of the trunk, then slammed the deck lid back down and carried the object toward the front porch, where Emmett was waiting now beneath the yellow light with the door open. The light had attracted a large moth that was flitting zanily around the porch. Though it was late, Emmett was fully dressed in bib overalls and a plaid work shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows.

And suddenly Carver knew for sure that, while Nadine might have taken Dewitt’s car to get past him, Dewitt hadn’t realized what she was doing or had an inkling of her purpose. The fact that his car instead of hers was missing from the garage had surprised him. He didn’t suspect that Carver had followed the Datsun from Fort Lauderdale, thinking the driver was Nadine.

And Nadine wouldn’t dream where Dewitt had gone after she’d left the apartment. Or why.

In the unsteady stream of light from the house, even from half a block’s distance, Carver recognized the bulky, cylindrical object cradled in Dewitt’s arms.

A scuba diver’s air tank.

Dominoes fell one after another in Carver’s mind, arranging themselves in a comprehensible pattern, revealing the landscape behind them.

Making clear what should have been obvious to him long before now.

He snatched up the Colt from beside him on the seat and tucked it beneath his belt. Then he quietly slid out of the car.

He limped toward Emmett Kave’s house, keeping his cane’s rubber tip on firm concrete in the dark. His shadow, a twisted, potent thing, writhed grotesquely before him like a tentative yet eager advance scout.